Growth, global expansion, and building complex networks of partnerships are a boon to businesses, but they also come at a price. Greater complexity invites greater risk and room for error, and if companies aren’t careful, they may easily enter into unwieldy processes and systems that are ineffective and inefficient.

Gartner just released their Magic Quadrantfor Multienterprise Supply Chain Business Networks. But what exactly are they and how can they help your business?

At its root, the term encapsulates how supply chains have evolved into complex networks involving multiple parties and partners. Across orders, organizations must communicate with everyone from manufacturing and warehousing to transportation partners, freight forwarders, distributors, retailers, and others. While having all these connections is certainly advantageous, the pressing question is: are you really making the most of what you have?

Supply chain networks are the future and we’re not the only ones speaking about it. Multi-Enterprise Business Networks are becoming a hot topic for analyst firms such as Gartner and many solutions are touting their network of partners and suppliers.

The definition of Supply chain visibility has evolved more than any other term in supply chain. From track and trace to multi-tier inventory, supply chain visibility is used to describe improvements in how we use data to track and make better decisions in our supply chain.

Today, we would like to talk about end-to-end supply chain visibility and how organizations are using supply chain orchestration in order to get real-time actionable visibility into the orders that are being executed throughout their end-to-end supply chains. This is key.

Digitization has changed everything. It’s changed not only how we interact but how we make decisions with readily available information. This accessibility to information and organizations has flattened the playing field for every organization as they look to market and sell their wares.

Supply chain networks and our ability to collaborate across them is becoming a critical core competency for successful supply chain operations. With more external parties and partners involved in helping us to deliver a positive customer experience through the supply chain, it’s critical that we evolve how we think about these parties, their impact on business success and how we consistently improve collaboration across them.

With today’s growing supply chain complexity, we’re seeing organizations struggle to deliver customer value with their supply chains at a cost that helps to make their business profitable.

It’s a huge problem that is getting more difficult by the day as organizations and supply chain professionals look for answers in their strategies and the technologies they use as the foundation for their supply chains. Oftentimes, the solution is not replacing the legacy systems they have in place but by connecting and extending them with a supply chain control tower.

We live in a “Now” economy with customers that are consistently expecting faster and faster delivery service levels with the same amount of care and in-full execution. However, doing so has become increasingly complex in the supply chain. Orders are coming in with greater variability due to more front-end options and the geographies we need to service with our supply chain are growing. So it’s not just about increased speed but increased speed with more tailored supply chains across increasingly expanding geographies.

As organizations move forward with determining how to transform their supply chains, it’s critical to understand that successful supply chains aren’t driven just by more investment into static resources but about agility in the way that we use our assets, investments and partners. The one constant we know is that business changes will happen and these changes will have a direct impact on our supply chains increasing the need to adjust and adapt quickly to drive cost efficient and customer focused practices.

Over the past decade, supply chain leaders have increasingly been asked to reduce the cost associated with fulfilling of customer orders on-time and in-full. However, in most cases, they have been asked to do so with less funding while the quantity of orders has increased. Let’s face it; that is tough position to be in.